Legal Writing Coaching

Santiago, Chile

January 7, 8 and 9th, 2008

• Organized by ESE:O

• With the support of the Chilean Bar Association and the Law School,

Universidad Diego Portales

Legal Writing Coaching

Objective:TO SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVE LEGAL WRITING LEVEL IN ENGLISH

Description:• PERSONALIZED TEACHING PROGRAM

• Material:Each student will receive a copy of the book Legal Writing: Getting It Right and Getting It Written, written by Mary Ray as well as class support materials.

• Certificate:Each student will receive a certificate of participation granted by the Faculty of Law of the University Diego Portales.

• LIMITED SPACE OF UP TO 20 STUDENTS

• ADVANCED ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED

• HOURS AND METHOD OF WORK ADAPTED TO THE ACTIVE PROFESSIONALS :

– combination of online and face2face– 14 hours– group and individualized teaching

Legal Writing Coaching

• ANGLE of the project: as Mary very well put it: "Building for democracy, empowering from within and below." We are working within a DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION context, linked to developing social and cognitive skills OF A PARTICULAR SUBSET OF SOCIETY, WITH GREAT POTENTIAL FOR FURTHERING DEMOCRACY AND THE RULE OF LAW SUCH AS LAW STUDENTS and LAWYERS.

• "How to communicate is key to democracy." Argumentation and reason are invaluable tools for citizens; knowledge has always been a resistance to dictatorships and injustice, it is the ability to name, denounce and work out problems faced by individuals and society at large.

• Law is a privileged field in which to intervene: the students will become policy makers, the makers of law and of justice (hopefully).

• Impact of globalization • General use of the English language in international business and legal transactions

• Need to teach skills to manage legal terminology which is precise, clear and direct when preparing and reading legal documents:

– Emphasis on personalized methodology– Intensive learning support (virtual and face2face)– Development of each student’s personal, social, intercultural and congnitive skills.

First steps…

• Prof. Mary Ray to meet with writing teachers from her ESE:O program and from the University of Diego Portales (sharing ideas and the possibility of working together in the future)

• Consolidate a team between Prof. Mary Ray and ESEO team members: Ximena Cajas, Patricia Julianelle, Gloria Franco, Soledad Falabella

• The workshop for attorneys needed to cover its costs, which would in effect cover the costs of the meetings as well.

• Thus we began planning simultaneous projects one year before they were to take place…

Structure of the workshop

• A one-week, intensive course

• Individual feedback, group work, and interaction with peers.

• Geared to attorneys who already knew English sufficiently for the class to be conducted in that language.

• Improvement of the participant’s communication to U.S. attorneys, rather than improvement of written English per se.

• Importance of the name—Coaching: Cognitive and social skills

combined: intercultural focus, dialogic, collaboration.

• Scheduled to fit around the participants’ work day.

Thus we met in three blocks of time in the late afternoon,

with individual meetings scheduled for two other late afternoons.

• How can people without intensive technological experience seize virtual tools and use them to their advantage?

• How can web-based technologies introduce and nurture local and global collaboration?

• How can virtual interaction organize creativity as well as produce results?

• How can individual online training be combined with in-person and virtual group work? What are the unique advantages of this approach?

• How does virtual written interaction facilitate more complex and efficient work?

ese:o, an organization committed

to the design, development, and

implemenation of social projects

through virtual interaction.

ese:o, creates and transfers

knowledge and know-how to groups

without intensive technological

experience through critical thinking

and collaborative writing.

WE UNDERSTAND OUR WORK …

• ...as collaborative;

• to be in writing, and a space for reflection;

• as a means to facilitate and empower human communication through technology;

• as a tool to systematize knowledge produced in virtual environments (platform);

• as empowering learning communities with concrete social and congnitive skills.

• DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHO-SOCIAL SKILLS

Nurtures •teamwork•personal empowerment

through self-expression •intercultural skills:

learning to think of the place

of the other, to become aware

and value diversity

• DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS IN COLLABORATIVE AND INDIVIDUAL EFFORTS

Allows forthe elaboration of original, complex, pertinent, and logical discourse in a dialogic context.

• DEVELOPMENT OF DISCURSIVE SKILLS

Facilitatesthe creation of written documents worthy of publication.

Content of the workshop

• Determining what information would be most useful to the participants.

• To build an effective, respectful program:

focus on the needs and interests of the participants, on serving the needs

of the attending Chilean attorneys.

• research

Content of the workshop

• Working together, Ximena and Mary developed an understanding of the differences that would affect the kinds of documents the participants wrote for U.S. attorneys.

• Objective: informative documents (since the Chilean lawyers would not be writing briefs for U.S. courts)

• Documents explaining Chilean law to U.S. attorneys (since this would be the kind of information Chilean lawyers would most often be providing to their U.S. clients)

• We also vetted the materials and the plan with the co-teacher, Patricia Julianelle, a U.S. attorney working in Chile, and with the other team members.

• All registered participants were asked to submit an example of their writing before the workshop.

• We used the legal situations in these memos, then, to help create samples to be used in the workshop. We also used the samples to verify that our planned curriculum for the workshop was on track.

Content of the workshopFirst day: a comparison of the U.S. legal reader--how he or she reads, what he or she expects, and

what assumptionsthe or she makes about the way the law works—with the Chilean legal reader.

We began the presentation by demonstrating how the U.S. legal reader approaches an informative document, such as

a research memo. Specifically, we talked about the U.S. readers’ concern for:• Reading the memo quickly• Having the answer appear early in the document• Having the reasoning explained step by step, and • Being aware of any counter-arguments or disadvantages of any position taken

Regarding the assumptions the U.S. readers would make, we talked about • Their expectation that precedent cases would be important, • Their expectation that the meaning of code provisions could be debated,. and• Their expectation that judicial opinions would matter much more than scholarly opinions on any

given issue.

Then, we then asked the participants to explain how Chilean lawyers approached an informative document how this was different from the U.S. attorneys: help participants plan how they would organize a memo explaining Chilean law to a U.S. reader, these insights fit into ageneric organization pattern that we provided in the course materials.

Content of the workshop

Second day: lab session, with participants bringing their laptops and information and working on the document. The two teachers, Patricia and Mary, and the assistant, Ximena, moved around the room answering questions and providing ideas as needed.

• The participants also conducted lively conversations with each other, sharing ideas and laughter as they worked on their projects. We were delighted to see that the first day’s discussion had helped build just the esprit de corps we wanted in the workshop; this was essential to the success of the third day of the workshop.

Third day: participants were asked to send the documents they had written to Mary by noon on this day. Mary then had time to review those documents and create some examples to use in the final day of the workshop.

Fourth day: we had our final workshop session. The focus of this session was on revision techniques that would add clarity and professional polish to the memo: shorter revision exercises,

• Usually the students worked in pairs or groups of three, but later as a group to vary the class rhythm. The class seemed comfortable enough with each other to talk openly about possible solutions, they had lost any self-consciousness about making mistakes and did not seem worried about how they appeared to others, even though we had attorneys with widely different levels of experience and expertise. This was an unplanned outcome, but a most welcome one. We ended the third day’s class by awarding certificates and celebrating at a brief but elegant reception. This was our final time to be together, although the class was not yet quite completed.

Content of the workshop

• Final component: an individual session with each writer, focusing on that writer’s questions and providing individual written feedback. These sessions provided much useful information to the writers and were well received by those who made use of them.

• Unfortunately, we learned that it was hard for writers to get away from work for these individual appointments, and many participants had to reschedule or even cancel appointments. Thus the one major change we plan for future workshops is to structure the workshop so that the individual appointments can occur within the workshop time, most likely during the writing lab.